Surely Professor Glaeser knows the answer to his question: Why put knives to the census? (Boston Globe, June 28, 2012: A19)

The cuts passed by the house are of a piece with the Republican Party's attack on science. They just do not want to know the facts. The larger they can make the error bars around our estimates of pollution, child mortality, global warming, national poverty and even housing starts, the better pleased they will be.

Introducing uncertainty in the science, enables them to say as Mitt Romney once said: "do I think the world's getting hotter? yeah, I don't know that but I think that it is. ... I don't know if it's mostly caused by humans. ... What I'm not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don't know the answer to." (Quoted
in Kristoff's column in the New York Times of June 26, 2012).

Until the country regains its collective wisdom and makes a commitment to honor scientific facts, we are in for troubling times.